Book Review

A Town Like Alice, by Nevil Shute

I stayed up late last night to finish this book. It is the kind of book that is hard to put down but as I've been thinking more about it I'm a bit disappointed.

The heroine of the book is Jean Paget, a fictional character based on a real person that Nevil Shute met and admired. Jean is captured by the Japanese during their invasion of the Pacific island where she lives and is forced, along with a sizable group of other women and children, to march hundreds of miles in search of a women's prison camp. Jean is the only single woman in the group, and is one of those who survive - about half of the group did not.
After the war Jean returns to England where she inherits a significant amount of money. The money enables her return to the island in order to help a village that had sheltered her group during the war. Jean then travels to Australia for more adventure.

A Town Like Alice introduces many themes and interesting ideas that are never quite completely explored or taken to a logical finish. The book just leaves the ideas hanging out there. The heroine isn't fully developed. The book reads more like an autobiographical book of memoirs, where the faults and shortcomings of the main character are left completely to the reader's imagination -the heroine Jean is always fit for the task set before her and always manages to rise to any occasion.

It bugs me a little bit that equal emphasis is given to her ability to make a town by building an ice cream parlor, swimming pool, beauty salon and dress shop, as to her courage to survive what is essentially a death march and deal successfully with her captors.

It is an interesting idea that it takes courage to lead your life during normal, peaceful times just as it does in time of war, but that theme is just one of many that are never developed in this book.

This book could have been so much more. That it's not leaves me a little bummed. It's romantic fluff, which is fine if that's what you're looking for. But if you're looking for fluff, a WWII death march isn't exactly a fluffy place to start.